Rock & roll and art. Essays and essaying. Looking and listening. Synonyms for memory. Synonyms for thinking about memory. Nostalgia versus skepticism. The distance between bygones and bitrates. Baseball. Books and CDs. Chapbooks and vinyl. 45 and 33 1/3 and 320. Photography. Thoughts. Arguments. High in between low. Mythmaking.

Friday, June 3, 2011

We You Me: In Defense of Autobiography

Against the tiresome argument that autobiographical writing is narcissistic, I can only say this: distinctions must be made between good autobiography and poor; and more importantly, the autobiographical impulse is ultimately a humble, and a humbling, impulse. It has always been this way for me.

When I begin an essay, or find my way into a subject autobiographically, I'm trusting not that the qualities of my experiences or character matter in and of themselves, but that I can recognize what in my unique experience might be, in the recollection of and in the telling, emblematic of something larger, something not exclusive but recognizable. I ask myself, directly and indirectly: If I care, does that not mean that someone else will? If the answer is No, then I've got work to do. This is mostly an unconscious conversation I have with myself when writing and editing, but the ringing impulse is always there. Do I dismiss the subject of the piece as too trivial or too hackneyed to be redeemed, or do I explore further, trusting my impulse to the page? Again: not to celebrate or commemorate experience simply because I had it, but because undoubtedly others have as well, and might find in my shaping that they fit inside in a way that reveals far less about me (privately) than it does about them (personally). We you me: that's what's ultimately humbling about writing autobiographically, the profound (and healthy!) discovery that in fact I'm not particularly unique or special. Is there some light arrogance involved in presuming that my experience might resonate? I think quite the contrary.

~~

I've written about the autobiographical silhouette before, and about some petty thieving in my past. I'm reading Garry Wills' compact biography of Saint Augustine (part of the defunct Penguin Lives series) and in it Wills recounts the oft-told story of sixteen-year old Augustine stealing some pears from a local orchard. Wills notes that Augustine obsessed on this small transgression, spending more than half of Book Two of his Confessions trying to make sense of it. Wills writes:

It was more than [a petty theft] to Augustine. In fact, he had dismissed with passing mention earlier thefts of food from his family larder, food used to to bribe others into letting him play with them. That theft had a motive. The pear theft seemed not to. He specifically says he had legitimate access to more and better pears (probably on Romanian's estate). He did not want to eat or use the stolen goods. He and his fellows in the raid carted the fruit off and dumped it before pigs. Why did they do it? Augustine goes down and down into the mystery of this apparent acte gratuit: "Simply what was not allowed allured us" (eo liberet quo non liceret).

When reading this I was struck by the similarities between Augustine stealing those pears and me stealing a crappy plastic ring from a boardwalk five-and-dime when I was ten. Despite the differences in age between Augustine and me, the correspondences were interesting, and inevitable, and, in that moment of reading and reflecting, my childish gesture and a childish gesture of the (future) Bishop of Hippo Regius morphed — became, as in metaphor, something new and strange and compelling. You're comparing yourself to Augustine, elevating yourself to the plateau of one of history's great thinkers. No. I'm exploring a startling, and moving, replication of gestures: pathetic, trivial thieving across centuries. Someone transgresses, someone transgresses. That brief historical (read: not historic) moment of recognition of myself in Augustine, and thus others in myself, and, perhaps, Augustine in others — a transparency laid atop a transparency atop a transparency— was kind of thrilling. Augustine and I traded silhouettes, reaching for something that doesn't belong to us, trusting an unnamed impulse and fearing it at the same time, then attempting to make sense of it. In this moment I didn't elevate myself hubristically to the level of the great Augustine — indulgently viewing my simple boardwalk transgression through the scrim of a fourth century writer, philosopher, and theologian — as much as I received Augustine at the splendidly ordinary human level. Humane, humbling stuff. Hardly Saint Joe, more like Augustine the Common.

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Author of This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, and Conversations With Greil Marcus (editor). Four-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. Music Columnist at The Normal School. Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

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Brief Encounters: An Anthology of Short Nonfiction

Norton

The Birth of Rock and Roll

Dust-to-Digital

How To Write About Music

Bloomsbury

This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began: essays

Orphan Press

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found

Camion Blanc

Conversations With Greil Marcus

University Press of Mississippi

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

The Fleshtones: Histoire d'un Groupe de Garage Américain

Camion Blanc

AC/DC's Highway to Hell

Continuum

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found

Bloomsbury

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

Installations

Penguin

Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band

Bloomsbury

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches